By Paolo Sartori
Female suicides plagued Soviet Central Asia at least since the 1950s,[1] but their number increased significantly in the 1980s, during which period they became a matter of public concern in the USSR. The following is an excerpt from a report penned by a member of the Society for the Transmission of Political and Scientific Knowledge,[2] a state-sponsored institution for the promotion of atheism, which draws attention to the phenomenon of suicides among young women in Central Asia:
Young people entering into marriage often do not see one another prior to registration in the marriage registry office. […] There are cases of a girl having been shown the photograph of a man, whom she agrees to marry, and then a completely different person comes to the marriage registry office, often one with physical defects. As a rule, in such instances the girl marries anyway, since refusal to marry is forbidden by public opinion. It is one of the most fearsome tragedies of Central Asia that the sole form of protest possible in these circumstances is self-immolation by the bride. This topic has already been discussed at some length in the popular press. I would only add that in addition to the 270 such self-immolations of which we know, there are uncounted victims who have been swallowed up by, for example, the silent waves of the Zeravshan River. Also silent are official statistics on the number of women who have poisoned themselves with vinegar essence.[3]
Produced during the last days of the USSR, this report is largely premised upon the facile assumption that Central Asian societies could defy Sovietization on account of their unshakable Islamic traditionalism, a conviction that informed many who during the Cold-War period attempted to explain the resilience of Muslimness after the Second World War.[4] The high rate of suicides among women should therefore be understood, says the report, as one of the tragic consequences of the encounter between Soviet modernization and a traditional (that is, patriarchal and religious) society.[5] With any chances of emancipation inhibited, young brides preferred suicide over an unhappy life, we are told.
An occasional observer of things Soviet may note, however, that there isn't anything specifically religious, let alone Islamic in the very act of committing suicide.[6] After all, those young women took their lives on account of various considerations, including being forced to marry against their will, domestic violence, and the limitations to their freedom, among other things.[7] However, Soviet authorities did regard suicides in Central Asia as a Muslim socio-cultural phenomenon and outsourced a moral campaign to thwart self-immolations to the Muslim Spiritual Board of Central Asia known by the Russian acronym SADUM.[8]
Established in 1943, SADUM was one of the four Muslim Spiritual Boards that the Communist Party state created to institutionalize Islam across the USSR.[9] Operating at a supra-regional level (European Russia and Siberia, the North Caucasus, Transcaucasia, and Central Asia and Kazakhstan), each of the four Muslim Spiritual Boards was presided over by one mufti, who was flanked by a group of scholars of Islamic sciences (ʿulamāʾ).[10] The Muslim Spiritual Boards had representatives at the republican and regional levels (called qāḑīs and muḥtasibs at each level, respectively), and supervised the religious activities at shrines and mosques.[11] Thus organized, such institutions helped the Soviet state to reach out to and influence life within the Muslim ecumene, on the one hand, and they provided Muslims with a reliable and authoritative interlocutor when seeking spiritual guidance, on the other hand. Muslim Spiritual Boards did not operate unsupervised, however. Indeed, they reported directly to the Council for the Affairs of Religious Cults, an organ established in 1944 under the Council of Ministers, and its successor, the Council for Religious Affairs established in 1965 (hereafter, "CARC").[12]
Between 1949 and 1991, SADUM's ʿulamāʾ issued a series of fatwās and circulars to show that from the standpoint of sharīʿa, suicides were unacceptable and that no Muslim cleric should preside over a funeral prayer for a woman who killed herself.[13] If they did, imams would undergo official sanction and lose their jobs.
We can gain a sense of how this process unfolded by looking at a fatwā dated May 20, 1959, which opens with a question addressed directly to the mufti Ziyouddin Bobokhonov (Ḍiyaʿ al-Dīn Bābākhānov, in office from 1957 to 1983):
Question (masʾala): Because of their absolute ignorance (kamāl nādānliq), some people throw themselves intentionally into ruin and commit suicide with their own hands – for example, by setting themselves on fire, by killing themselves with some [sharp] objects, or by shooting themselves, or by throwing themselves off tall structures, or by throwing themselves into big rivers to drown, they die by succumbing to specific situations. How are such deeds to be evaluated according to the Islamic sharīʿa, and what is the prescription (ḥukm) for such people in this world and in the other? Is he worthy of a funerary prayer (janāza namāzī), or isn't he? Answer these questions impartially, and you will be rewarded.
Answer (jawāb): From a rational point of view (ʿaqlan), the above-mentioned actions represent a shameful and deplorable situation that harms society and is a highly inappropriate and useless action. Likewise, these acts are categorically forbidden by the Islamic religion (diyānat-i islāmiyya) and their perpetration was never considered licit. One who has committed such a shameful act will face various torments in the other world, and he will be excluded from the community [of believers] and made subject to [other] limitations.[14]
What were the juristic references with which the mufti Ziyouddin Bobokhonov scaffolded his fatwā? Surprisingly, when crafting his legal opinion, he proceeded in a way which had little resemblance to local writing traditions.[15] In fact, instead of relying on a hierarchy of Ḥanafī juristic authorities, he referenced exclusively the Qurʾān[16] and ḥadīths.[17] Bobokhonov's hermeneutic method was clearly a move away from the established practice of following (taqlīd) the authoritative opinions transmitted within the Ḥanafī madhhab.[18] "On the basis of these [Qurʾānic] verses and ḥadīths," opined mufti Bobokhonov, "the scholars have concluded that a deliberate suicide is a great sin. It has been ruled that for the said reasons he [who commits suicide] is deprived of paradise and will abide in the constant torments of hell; and in order to arouse in others an aversion to such deeds, no funeral prayer is recited over his body."[19]
This fatwā was first issued and distributed in 1959. Two years later, mufti Ziyouddin Bobokhonov returned to the subject. This time, however, he authored a "certificate" (spravka), that is, a document of broad juridical significance, and one typical of Soviet bureaucracy:
Islam categorically refutes the permissibility of such actions [i.e., suicides]. The verses of the Qurʾān and the Prophetic traditions indicate that any form of self-immolation is considered a grave sin. Islam urges people to refrain from such reckless acts. A close reading of religious texts points to traditions arguing that, even if exhausted by the hardships of life, people are not only forbidden to commit suicide, but they are also not allowed to wish for death other than a natural one. In the past, cases of suicide were interpreted as a consequence of a peculiar mental illness. [However, now, we see that] lack of education and morals, improper behavior toward women, especially when humiliations become intolerable, all these phenomena have led in the past and lead now to such a state of mind, which often ends in suicide. Those who practice Islam will never find justification for such reckless and tragic actions in any religious book. Because such cases happen in real life, the Muslim Spiritual Board of Central Asia and Kazakhstan has immediately issued fatwās and distributed them among all the mosques. [Such fatwās] are based on the relevant religious provisions [sootvetstvuiushchimi religioznymi polozheniami], which condemn the act of suicide. Furthermore, people have been sent to individual mosques to explain to believers that suicide is the greatest sin and God's eternal punishment awaits people who wish for themselves such a tragic end. In places where imams have followed these fatwās and made the believers aware of their content, there has been undoubtedly a decrease in such cases, for example, in Namangan and Samarkand.[20]
This note is particularly important, for it indicates that Party organs had thought that an agit-prop campaign centred on a fatwā against suicide could reach the lost souls of Socialist Uzbekistan. This was happening in 1961 at the height of the Khrushchevian anti-religious campaign, when the state was taking new measures to curtail public performances of religiosity.[21] Not only ought suicides not happen in a Communist society, but also no one was to know about their existence. In fact, in the same year, the Muslim Spiritual Board went on the hunt for imams who had presided over funerals for people who had committed suicides. And in the province of Namangan alone at the end of March 1961 an audit commission removed several imams of various congregational mosques for offering their religious services to the families of the departed.[22] In April of the same year, SADUM sent out a circular to all official mosques in Central Asia, which reminded imams to operate according to the fatwā against suicides and thus avoid the performance of funerals: "[In cases of] violation of [the prescriptions of our] fatwās [narusheniia fetv], . . . they [imams] are warned about the application of severe punishments."[23] What were previously non-binding legal opinions, under Soviet rule fatwās morphed into sharīʿa-based decrees.
Under Brezhnev, state policy regarding suicides among Muslims in Uzbekistan took a different turn. In 1967, the mufti Ziyouddin Bobokhonov issued a new fatwā that blended the usual references to the Islamic scriptures with a new pro-Soviet rhetoric. More specifically, this fatwā criticized those who committed suicide on two different levels. From the point of view of sharīʿa, it argued that they will burn in hell. But from a secularist point of view, it demoted self-murderers to individuals unworthy of the blessing of Soviet citizenship:
Thank God we Soviet Muslims [Sovet musulmonlari] live in a society, a society that can guarantee to every person all the conditions for [a normal human] life. [Here] no one can disparage someone else's life. Such a just society is unique in the world. Therefore, there is no reason to commit suicide in our homeland. Every person, whether a woman or a man, should understand this truth and thank God Almighty that they live in such a just society. Any difficult problem can be solved with tolerance and good measures. However, if there is impatience and ingratitude, the consequences will not be good. In accordance with the Holy Qurʾān and the ḥadīths of the Prophet and based on the above evidence, the Muslim Spiritual Board of Central Asia and Kazakhstan appeals to all Muslims and expects them to take drastic measures against suicide. You must consider it both your religious and human duty to entrust the prevention of them to the imams. All imams must explain to Muslims [by referring to Qurʾānic] verses and [the Prophetic] ḥadīths that suicides and self-immolations are serious sins, and they must explain in detail that such terrible acts represent [a manifestation of] ingratitude for the blessing of life which God Almighty has given to His servants. At the same time, imams and preachers are to refuse to perform the funeral prayer for those who commit suicide. In addition, they are required by sharīʿa to stand firm in their words; they should avoid attending their funerals and reciting verses from the Holy Qurʾān to [honour] their souls. In this way, they will make it clear to the public how serious the sin of those who commit suicide is and protect Muslim believers from this terrible act.[24]
Keeping in mind how pervasive the performance of funerals was for those who had killed themselves, one wonders how imams in Uzbekistan explained the meaning of the fatwās to their parishioners. Were they ready to convey such a merciless message coming from the Tashkent offices of the Spiritual Board or did they soften that abrasive and dehumanizing language? One can attempt to answer this question by looking into provincial archives and examining the sermons read at the local mosques. In 1981, Usmonjon Rahimjonov,[25] the imam of the congregational mosque of Kho'ja Ismoil Bukhoriy, north of Samarqand, delivered a vitriolic sermon against a fellow imam who had performed a funeral for someone who had committed suicide in a neighbouring collective farm. I quote here the most significant passages of this sermon to give a sense of the kind of style that Soviet mullahs often employed when dealing with such a sensitive issue:
God said in the Qurʾān: "I have taught people to be greater than all the living beings on earth," [and yet today in our homeland] we observe a disgraceful situation, which is unheard of in any other religion. All the wrongdoings of these Muslims have tarnished the good name of Islam. The Holy Qurʾān says: "Obey God, then the Prophet, then the heads of state." 1) Obedience to God, as everyone knows, amounts to doing what is said to do and not doing what is said not to do. 2) Obedience to the Prophet means being kind to each other. 3) To obey the people who rule the nation, regardless of the system [of government] and the law of the country [means that one is bound to] leave it to the state to decide the affairs of this world. This Qurʾānic verse must be for us a guiding principle. […] Someone has asked me the following: "What is the deceased to be blamed for?" [….] Our Prophet said: "Whoever hangs himself or sets himself on fire will be punished by hanging or burning in hell." In such a prosperous time of real socialism, when everything is available [for the taking], when our state satisfies all the needs of people, what else is missing? By acting in this way, people in fact decide to abandon humanity. Therefore, if one kills oneself, there is no benefit in reciting a funeral for him. We request that those who presided over the funerals be punished by the laws of the state.[26]
The deployment of this caustic rhetoric can explain why after the Second World War fatwās morphed into what in Soviet bureaucratese goes under the term of "sharīʿa-based rulings" (shariatskie ukazy, prigovory). Such a linguistic shift was not merely cosmetic. Rather, it signalled that fatwās were designed to function as circulars issued by Party organs, that is, as state orders endowed with legal force. And such a legal force manifested itself in full once said fatwās were distributed at the mosques. Records from the province of Samarqand show that between 1975 and 1985 imams were expected to inform CARC commissioners even about cases of attempted suicides within their congregations.[27] In turn, CARC representatives reported to the local prosecutors who investigated every-day life crimes (bytovye prestupleniia).[28] Not only weren't Soviet fatwās dead letter, but they also had direct effects beyond the confines of the mosques and their congregations.
Party organs' decision to abdicate in favor of the Spiritual Board on matters of suicide should give us pause, for its implications and unintended consequences are revealing of the workings of Soviet secularity. Unwilling to regard them as a problem affecting Soviet society, the atheist state confined suicides to the domain of Uzbek culture, a culture deeply influenced by Islam, a religion which hampered the evolution of Soviet citizens in their path to perfection, i.e., Communism, as Party organs would have it.[29]
In fact, the Party state turned to the scholars of Islam to deal with what it considered manifestations of backwardness in Uzbek society since the establishment of the Muslim Spiritual Board. Across the four decades that followed, the board issued dozens of fatwās designed not only to regulate Islamic rituals, but also to refashion Soviet Central Asians' ethics qua Muslims. One is reminded of fatwās attempting to dissuade Central Asians from attending seances of exorcism, wearing the veil, performing circumcision, or paying the bride price, or just persuading them that the end of times was not in fact nigh.[30] One could say that such a way of proceeding is typical of secularist states and was therefore perfectly in agreement with Soviet policies regarding Islam: the governing authorities carved out a space for religion and outsourced to ʿulamāʾ sanctioned by the state the definition of appropriate behavior according to religion.
But things were not so simple. A complicating factor was that the USSR did not confer on sharīʿa the status of a source of law;[31] and yet, by inviting muftis to deliberate on matters of social significance such as cases of suicides, the state brought about a grey zone in which Muslims' ethics was interpreted according to and could ultimately be regulated by sharīʿa (see, especially, my third essay in this series, "Qadi by Necessity: Muḥammad al-Khartikunī against the 'Wahhabis' in Dagestan (1980s)").[32] It is perhaps the inherent contradiction in state policy that can tell us something about the outcome of Soviet secularist policies. Premised as it was upon a paternalistic approach to religion, one which confined Muslimness to the domain of culture, Soviet secularism failed to make its subjects less religious and, by extension, less human.[33]
Notes:
[1] In 1958 and 1959, the office of the General Prosecutor of the USSR notes that in Socialist Uzbekistan alone, female suicides amounted to 484 and 317, respectively. See Russian State of Archive of Contemporary History, f. 5, op. 31, d. 146, l. 116, Svedeniia o chisle osuzhdennych za prestupleniia, predstavliaiushchie perezhitki rodovogo byta v 1958–1959 godach. I owe this reference to Niccolò Pianciola.
[2] The society was commonly known by the Russian word for "Knowledge," Znanie. See Victoria Smolkin-Rothrock, "The Ticket to the Soviet Soul: Science, Religion, and the Spiritual Crisis of Law Soviet Atheism," The Russian Review 73 (April 2014): 171–97.
[3] Sergei P. Poliakov, Everyday Islam: Religion and Tradition in Rural Central Asia, ed. Martha Brill Olcott (Armonk, New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1992), 54. I am grateful to Sergey Abashin for this reference.
[4] Sergey Abashin, Sovetskii Kishlak: Mezhdu kolonializmom i modernizatsiei (Moscow: NLO, 2015), 17.
[5] Poliakov, Everyday Islam: Religion and Tradition in Rural Central Asia, 3–5.
[6] Jacques Choron, "Concerning Suicide in Soviet Russia," Bulletin of Suicidology (1968): 31–36; Martin A. Miller and Ylana N. Miller, "Suicide and Suicidology in the Soviet Union," Suicide and Life-Threatening Behaviour 18, no. 4 (1988): 303–21.
[7] See also Ali Iğmen, "Soviet Central Asia," in Central Asia: Contexts for Understanding, ed. David W. Montgomery (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 2022), 132.
[8] Eren Tasar, Soviet and Muslim: The Institutionalization of Islam in Central Asia, 1943–1991 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 2.
[9] Ibid., 47.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Yaacov Ro'i, Islam in the Soviet Union from the Second World War to Gorbachev (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 107–109.
[12] Tasar, Soviet and Muslim: The Institutionalization of Islam in Central Asia, 47.
[13] Ro'i, Islam in the Soviet Union, 143, 546–47. See also "Russian Perspectives on Islam," https://islamperspectives.org/rpi/items/show/20749, last accessed on April 24, 2025.
[14] Archive of the Muslim Spiritual Board of Uzbekistan, unnumbered. There exists an abridged Russian translation in National Archive of Uzbekistan (O'zbekiston Milliy Arxivi, henceforth, "O'MA"), f. R-2456, op. 1, d. 326, l. 171. I am grateful to Bakhtiyor Bobojonov for sharing this file with me.
[15] On Central Asian fatwās and their crafting prior to the Soviet period, see Paolo Sartori, Visions of Justice: Sharī'a and Cultural Change in Russian Central Asia (Brill: Leiden, 2016), 257–63.
[16] "And do not kill yourselves," Qurʾān 4:28; "and do not let your own hands throw you into destruction," Qurʾān 2: 195.
[17] "A person belonging to the people of the past suffered from a boil, when it pained him, he drew out an arrow from the quiver and pierced it. And the bleeding did not stop till he died. Your Lord said: I forbade his entrance into Paradise. Then he (Hasan) stretched his hand towards the mosque and said: By God, Jundab transmitted this hadith to me from the Messenger of Allah." Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim, 1:214, https://sunnah.com/muslim:113a, last accessed June 4, 2025; "He who strangles himself will do so in hell, and he who thrusts a spear into himself will do so in hell," Mishkāt al-Maṣābīḥ, 16:8, https://sunnah.com/mishkat:3454, last accessed June 4, 2025; "And if somebody commits suicide with anything in this world, he will be tortured with that very thing on the Day of Resurrection," Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī 78:77, https://sunnah.com/bukhari:6047, last accessed June 4, 2025; "It was narrated from Jabir bin Samurah that: a man killed himself with an arrowhead and the Messenger of Allah said: 'As for me, I will not pray for him,'" Sunān al-Nasā'ī, 37:47, https://sunnah.com/nasai/21, last accessed June 4, 2025.
[18] Paolo Sartori, "What We Talk about When We Talk about Taqlīd in Modern Central Asia," in Sharia in the Russian Empire: The Reach and Limits of Islamic Law in Central Eurasia (1550–1900), ed. P. Sartori and D. Ross (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2020), 299–327.
[19] Archive of the Muslim Spiritual Board of Uzbekistan, unnumbered.
[20] O'MA, f. R-2456, op. 1, d. 166, ll. 1–2.
[21] Tasar, Soviet and Muslim: The Institutionalization of Islam in Central Asia, 205.
[22] O'MA, f. R-2456, op. 1, d. 166, ll. 202–206.
[23] O'MA, f. R-2456, op. 1, d. 166, l. 201.
[24] O'MA, f. R-2456, op. 1, d. 740, ll. 7–11. The fatwā was originally crafted in Cyrillic-script Uzbek.
[25] For more information on Usmonjon Rahimjonov, see Paolo Sartori, A Soviet Sultanate: Islam in Socialist Uzbekistan, 1943–1991 (Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences Press, 2024), 293–99.
[26] Samarqand Oblast Archive, f. 1648, op. 1, d. 107, ll. 54–55.
[27] Samarqand Oblast Archive, f. 1648, op. 1, d. 111, ll. 33, 36, 37ob.
[28] On the legal category of every-day life crimes, see Aude-Cécile Monnot, "Judiciariser le marriage: L'introduction des « crimes de mode de vie » dans les républiques soviétiques d'Asie centrale (années 1920-1930)," Genèses 128 (2022): 78–99.
[29] In 1948, for example, "a Kyrgyz Party lecturer named Shaipov […] penned an article in a local publication, Agitator's Notebook, entitled 'The Origin and Reactionary Essence of Islam.' Intended as a series of talking points for propagandists, the piece made a number of false assertions concerning Islam: the requirement to veil stemmed from Muslims' belief that women were sinful and had 'impure breath'; Islam mandated bride-price; the shari'a encouraged men to beat their wives." Tasar, Soviet and Muslim: The Institutionalization of Islam in Central Asia, 88.
[30] On fatwās against Ṣūfī practices and shrine-visitation, see Sartori, A Soviet Sultanate: Islam in Socialist Uzbekistan, esp. ch. 1.
[31] SADUM's "fatwas had no legal basis in terms of Soviet law. The state asked for them as a form of extra insurance, as it were; its legislation was not contingent upon their issuance." Adeeb Khalid, "The Management of Islam in the Late Soviet Period," in Central Asia: Contexts for Understanding, ed. David W. Montgomery (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 2022), 167.
[32] For references to sharī'a in petitions to SADUM in Uzbekistan after the Second World War, see Paolo Sartori, A Soviet Sultanate: Islam in Socialist Uzbekistan, esp. ch. 2.
[33] For an extended set of reflections on Soviet secularity and Islam, see Paolo Sartori, "Why Soviet Islam Matters," Geistes-, sozial- und kulturwissenschaftlicher Anzeiger 157–158 (2022–23): 5–24.
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